I’m just reading this great post by Dan Blank on Crowd vs. Community, where he explores the concept of community as it relates to brands. Read the whole thing, it’s well worth it.
Readers of The New York Times are not a community. If you buy Honest Tea every day, you are not a part of a community with every other Honest Tea consumer. But for both of those brands, the possibility of community exists. I have been considering the lessons from Zappos as well. For all their really interesting cultural practices about customer service – do people shop from them out of a longstanding connection that is being formed, or because their prices are great, and their free shipping policy allows us to buy tons of shoes with zero risk? If their prices became average, and their shipping costs and return policy become the same as everyone else, would we continue advocating and shopping at Zappos at the levels we do?
Community requires action. Sometimes, that action is merely a thought process – that someone chooses to trust, chooses to look out for the good of the whole, and not just themselves. But the action of spending money does not always signify that we are ‘voting with our wallets’ and ACTIVELY participating in community that others define.
Without that action, members who share characteristics are merely a crowd – a mass behavioral pattern. Not a community.
When media brands, when consumer brands, when individuals approach social media, this is a key point to remember. That attention alone is not enough to build something of meaning and lasting value – that engagement is required, that action is required to build a lasting community. That spending a dollar with a brand, that following a Twitter feed, that reading an article is not enough of a measure to determine who is within or outside of a community. It may merely be consumption.
Think about this for a minute. We in associations are really, really lucky. Think about all these corporate brands (and small businesses too) that have to work so hard – and very often fail – to create “community” around what they sell. But I think you would agree with me that associations are much more than products and services (even if we sometimes have trouble communicating our value). We have community already. We know in our heart of hearts how to do that. We know how to nurture it – in real life.
We should be ahead of the curve on this now we’re in the digital age. We just need to own it. We need to stop worrying endlessly about the perceived loss of control, we need to stop fearing new technologies, we need to stop making up excuses about scarcity of resources and lack of easy ROI. We need to learn to translate the offline relationship building we already know how to do, to the online relationship building that requires doing things a little differently, a little more openly.
We are lucky. We have community. Personally, I am thankful every day to be working in an environment that has such a gift. Where we have an innate sense of what community is all about, where we have a core group of people (our members) to start with, where we don’t need to start from ground zero.
7 responses to "We are lucky. We have community."
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Word. I think about this every time I scroll down my Facebook page–those page managers for brands are working SO hard to try to make a community out of people who either just want to complain about products or get something free. Even brands/products I’m totally obsessed with and like to hear from, I wouldn’t consider others who share my love a community….or I guess if I did, it would be a very weak link, compared to, say, the community we belong to when we belong to an association. Being passionate about an industry and working daily to advance it, caring enough to volunteer time to serving on committees and developing standards, etc–THAT is the stuff true communities are made of.
I agree, we are lucky. I was talking with a friend who works for a well-established health insurance provider… and everyday they struggle with a sense of community, internally and externally. Granted, it’s health insurance, but for that I consider us lucky as well.
Maddie — Great insight. You are so right. Associations have such an advantage in the area of community. That is why I get concerned when I hear talk about abandoning the membership model. Related to your comments above, I love the following quote:
[There is} a very basic human need – the need to belong. Our need to belong is not rational, but it is a constant that exists across all people in all cultures. It is a feeling we get when those around us share our values and beliefs. When we feel like we belong we feel connected and we feel safe. As humans we crave the feeling and we seek it out.â€
Simon Sinek, Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action, Penguin Group, 2009, page 53.
Thanks, all! I just remember reading through that post and thinking we forget sometimes how lucky we really are to have people who already care about our organizations. Tony, thanks for mentioning Simon Sinek – his name has come up a lot recently, he writes really great stuff. We should lobby for him to be invited to speak at ASAE…
Wow. Great read.
I’m looking for research on how social media impacts the actual community. I’m working on grant applications for a small public radio station in Indiana. My guess is that it helps people tackle local real world problems. Increases computer literacy and increases entreprenship, but most of the data I find on the web is about using social media to increase traffic for business. Any hints?
Thanks Steve – you can dig around this blog, we write for the association community so there’s a lot here.
I’d also check out the NTEN blog (NTEN.org), Beth’s Blog and the Buzz Bin. There’s almost too much information out there on this! (Though I agree it’s often drowned out by the B2C social media stuff.)
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